Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."

My fiance and I have been discussing this issue for years. She is currently writing her dissertation, and I graduated last year. We are both Anthropologists and work closely with professors writing grant proposals for review by NIH. While I don't agree with the Bush Administrations views on cutting funding for the social sciences, I can hardly discredit their views that the social sciences aren't producing squat.

Articles are published in journals so they can be evaluated by peers, but what about the res